Nonfiction.

She Saved Herself In The Holocaust By Betraying Others

January 03, 1993|By Reviewed by Irving Abrahamson, editor of "Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel."

Stella:

One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal and Survival in Hitler's Germany

By Peter Wyden

Simon & Schuster, 382 pages, $23

In 1937 Stella Goldschlag was 14 and already the reigning beauty of the Goldschmidt School in Berlin. In 1937, when Peter Wyden was 13, he and his parents emigrated to the United States. "Stella" is his attempt, 50 years after the fact, to reconcile his schoolboy adolescent dreams and memories of Stella Goldschlag with the evidence of the crimes she committed. It is the story of his effort not only to discover how she had turned into "a cannibal who consumed her own," but also to find "an explanation, a key to her crimes and similar deeds of others."

Trapped in Berlin during Hitler's war against the Jews, captured and beaten by the Gestapo, Stella finally agreed to work for the Gestapo in exchange for a promise to prevent the deportation of her parents. Barely 20, she quickly became a "catcher," an expert in singling out fellow Jews who had gone underground in Berlin. Haunting cafes, coffee shops, movie theaters, the opera, and cemeteries, she became notorious as the "the blond ghost" and "the blond poison."

By the war's end she had betrayed hundreds of total strangers, as well as friends and acquaintances, to their deaths. Found guilty in three separate trials, Stella served only one sentence-10 years at hard labor in Soviet prisons-afterward converting to Christianity and becoming an open anti-Semite.

Seeking clues to "the art of survival," Wyden set out to "discover what people do when they face the final choice: to die or to join the devil." "Stella" is the story of how he pursued Stella's trail into the 1990s, located her and finally confronted her without gaining any confession of her guilt.

On its surface, "Stella" is an investigative reporter's account of how he became the catcher. Below the surface, however, "Stella" is a very different matter.

Wyden uses the complexities of Stella's story and other stories of Jewish collaboration to make a case against any further "hunt for the culpable" because their trials clog the courts, overburden lawyers, judges, and witnesses, and deal in matters "essentially insoluble to this day." Because questions of guilt and innocence in these cases are neither open and shut nor cost-effective, Wyden seems to think justice need no longer be pursued.

Even though Wyden recognizes that had he remained in Berlin he might very well have turned out to be one of Stella's victims, he is reluctant to condemn her totally, for, as he admits, "I do not know what I would have done if I had been told by men in black uniform that I could save my parents from deportation. I just don't know, thank goodness." For him "evil is a disorienting phenomenon. It has too many faces." Too many faces to recognize and judge it, apparently.

Paradoxically, if Wyden has doubts about judging the guilt or innocence of collaborators, he has none at all about judging the guilt of the victims-those Jews who allowed themselves to be trapped inside Germany and, more inclusively, all those who, as he believes, went like sheep to the slaughter.

Discussing his classmates from the Goldschmidt School, most of whom managed, as he did, to get out of Germany before the Holocaust, Wyden writes, "Almost all of us acted, if sometimes too late. With tragic exceptions, almost all escaped. Nobody I knew met disaster standing quietly by once the danger turned palpable. We were not sheep. We were survivors, one way or another, unlike the others, the millions who perished, the placid who lacked the psychological and financial resources." He remains appalled that the "passive majority" stayed "behind too long, unwilling to move, docile-waiting in passivity until millions were herded away like proverbial sheep."

Wyden's arrogance, illogic and historical inaccuracy are breathtaking. The falsity of his sheep metaphor aside, can it be that Wyden and his circle escaped because of their resources? Are we really to believe that 13- and 14-year-olds acquired the necessary affidavits and visas, paid the exit taxes and got out of Germany on their own? If the placid and the passive had had "financial resources," would they have taken action? If yes, then how can he fault them? If no, why does he mention money at all? Moreover, contrary to Wyden, it is a matter of historical fact that the majority of German Jews was far from passive. According to the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust," 346,000 out of more than a half-million German Jews did get out of Germany, though not all of them survived.